It didn’t take long for the spammers to find the new archives and begin to spread their shit around in liberal doses again. Imagine my dismay when the shiny new Movable Type 3 deleterator only allowed me to delete trackbacks to my own entries, leaving several from coauthor pk I couldn’t delete.

After the usual round of chicken-bone waving and gesticulating and rebuilding, I still couldn’t delete the offending trackbacks (the symptom is that the deletion checkbox doesn’t appear on the far right column of the ping’s entry on the trackback screen). So I went for a walk through the MT support forums and found a thread on the matter, with a solution from Phil Ringnalda, with whom I’m locked in some strange blogospheric orbit (not unpleasant, mind you, but I’m beginning to think Phil and I worked down the hall from each other and sometimes said “good morning” in the elevator in another life).

The fix, in case you just don’t want to go look, is to hunt down around line 2161 of lib/MT/App/CMS.pm (it turned out to be line 2169 in my install of MT 3) for a line that looks like this:

($perms->{can_edit_all_posts}

and replace that with

($perms->can_edit_all_posts

(delete the curly braces).

Once that change was made, all was fine and I was able to remove the offending trackbacks on the spot. Much better. Looking forward to the arrival of MT Blacklist 2, recent awardee of the MT Plugin Developers’ Contest Grand Prize. It will evidently be part of a plug-in pack for MT 3.1, about which SixApart has revealed a little more just this evening.

Just skimming the “What’s New” file 6A posted, the “jump up and down, clap hands” feature looks to be “dynamic PHP publishing,” controllable on a per-template basis — so changes to templates won’t always involve a rebuild, except where you don’t want the PHP performance penalty, like an RSS feed people are downloading every 30 minutes for as long as their computer is on during the workday.

There’s also a scheduled posting feature, which is appealing in one of two ways: “future posting” is a good way for folks to keep a site in content for a few days at a time without having to be there to post. For blogs with a regular readership, that could be handy. During my LinuxToday days, I depended on future-posting to make the site tick over the course of a weekend, and when I moved from Virginia to Oregon it was useful to make things look like someone was awake at the switch first thing for the east coasters.

Time-shifted posting also makes it easy to have a totally knee-jerk reaction during the work-day that you can scribble into your blog and forget all about, setting it to magically post during whatever your periods of plausible deniability with the boss are.

“Blogging at work? Perish the thought! My 2,000 word essay on the evils of children writing books set in worlds their much more capable parents created was posted at 5:15 p.m. Well after working hours!”

In Other News:

Up to this point I’ve maintained several custom RSS feeds (No Mac, No Meta-Blogging, No-a-few-other-things by request). Doing them was initially a bit of a lark, but (as noted in the comments in a previous post) there’s some taxonomic drift going on, along with the fact that I’m just not sure whether I want to spend time classifying things finely enough that the feeds remain meaningful.

As I’ve said before, what a lot of people mistake for slobbishness is often the result of a thwarted perfectionism, and it’s not so different here: I can’t do the feeds “right,” so I don’t want to continue to do them. For now, they’re in place, but they’ll be turned into permanent redirects at some point in the near future, pointing at the full stories RSS feed, which provides all the content of every entry.

While we’re on it, there are also these feeds, which will remain around: